tall man, small world

Outdoors

Often today people worry about surveillance by the government with CCTV everywhere and intelligence agencies able to view what we do online (hi, Mr/Mrs NSA/GCHQ person) but there’s another side to the technology which is becoming ever more popular.

Many of us carry some form of video camera, I have a smartphone and a good compact camera that can record HD video, in fact I used this the other day to record a worker at our factory who was adamant he could cut a worktop with a saw that everyone else said was clearly blunt. The resulting video is a possible candidate for YouTube, complete with Top Gear style “four hours later…” captions, as I joked at the time.

We now have the ability to record everything we experience in some way or another and people feel the need, or the desire, to do exactly that and share it with the world, even in their most intimate moments, as if to prove that they did it, or how good at it they were, so to speak. It’s a standing joke that Instagram and Facebook are a repository of photos of people’s dinner but in some ways it’s true. In any pub you go in there are groups of drinkers gurning at smartphone cameras, never again will you be able to get utterly pished without it being recorded. I once had my glasses “borrowed” by a woman whose friend took a photo of her, wearing my glasses, with me kissing her cheek. Months later a woman stood by me at a bar turned and said “I’ve got a photo of you on my Facebook.” Same woman, same glasses. Technology has made it simpler, quicker and cheaper to create a digital photo album or slide show that, without needing shelf-space or the setting up of a projector, can be virtually infinite in size, accessible anywhere, searchable and sorted by date.

The next stage is again in the area of wearable technology. Google’s Glass project, along with other similar techie-eyewear, promise the ability to instantly record anything you can see, which has worried many privacy campaigners despite the devices clearly having a red, Borg-like, light on the side when they’re recording.

The other type of device is specially designed for recording just about everything you experience – the Lifelogger. Two devices have appeared so far, Autographer and Narrative, which are intended to document your life while you’re wearing it of course. While you’re not you can imagine it sitting there wondering where you’d gone. The two have different approaches, Autographer uses five sensors to detect location and changes in light and motion to take a photo when you change location of when it thinks you’re doing something interesting like running after someone. Narrative takes a picture twice a minute. When downloaded you can then look through what they’ve logged and perhaps see things you’d missed or remember something you’d forgotten – which might be both a blessing and a curse depending on the event.

One day we could all be carrying a multi-sensored device that, in the event of an emergency, could log what’s happened to you and call for help – a kind of personal Black Box Recorder. This is happening in cars already, as the Russian meteorite impact last year showed – the event captured by an unprecedented number of witnesses thanks to dashcams and smartphones. In-car video is also useful for insurance companies, TV clip shows and YouTube, recent personal experience of idiot drivers makes me want one more than ever.

Whether the current Lifelogging technology has a use is down to whether it’ll record anything useful or interesting but the idea has been picked up by emergency services who have considered something like Glass to both record an incident and how it’s dealt with (possibly for legal, in case of being sued, reasons, inevitably these days) while also providing vital information to the medic or police officer in real-time. Already trials have shown that police wearing body cams are seeing positive results in terms of arrested criminals accepting their guilt.

So we hurtle onwards into the recorded future, the problem could be having time to sort the wheat from the chaff of all these Lifelogged images and indeed where to store them all.

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For Ray Mears camping would be a tarp tied between a few trees somewhere in the outback but in this country many campers have moved on from simple pleasures of the outdoors. A campsite once consisted of a field devoid of cowshit, then came toilet blocks and shower rooms to de-grime yourself after a satisfying slog across the moors or up a mountain and back. Even then you’d retire to your tent, fire up the camping stove for some simple tinned beans and sausage or a dehydrated meal in a foil bag, maybe even sit around a campfire if it was allowed and drink a few beers or mugs of tea, look up at the stars and contemplate life, or tell a few stories or jokes.

Now though campsites are all teched up and I’m not in any way against that. If you can’t bear to be completely off-grid there are some that have electrical hook-ups for tents as well as caravans and motorhomes, if you don’t have that then you can always get a solar charger for your phone and tablet, in the future kinetic chargers will make use of your daily hikes to juice your kit. Many sites have good wireless broadband internet so you’ll never miss your favourite tv, can check your emails and continue to update the world on how your holiday’s going via Twitter and Facebook. I recently visited Hawes in the Yorkshire Dales and on the campsite there I was able to read the news via my AP news app on my Nexus 7, write notes for this blog on my tablet and netbook (yes, I’m the one who still uses one, because it’s portable and cheap) and send my envious friends at home a picture of the beautiful weather and scenery. My clever little tablet even added my exact GPS coordinates to the notes I added in Evernote.

If you can bear to take with you only your personal tech life and leave the work with an Out of Office notification then it’s the best of both worlds – the great outdoors when the weather’s nice combined with the comforting glow of the internet, or Angry Birds when it’s raining, or when you’re sat sipping a beer, listening to streamed music while reading articles as the sun sets. As I was for that all too brief week.

Many people worry about all the satellites up there pointing cameras down here but for scientists as well as governments they can be invaluable – particularly if you need to p p p pick up a penguin, or 9,000.

In recent years wildlife researchers have used satellite and aerial imagery to watch animal movements and behaviour. Dr Sabine Begall, from the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany who had been studying magnetic sensing in animals, initially mole rats, decided to see if larger animals might have the same. Dr Begall and colleagues used Google Earth to examine how cows stand in fields across the world (to rule out weather effects) and found that the majority faced north or south only, the effect was also seen in deer in the Czech Republic.

In 2009 a group monitoring how penguins were coping with changing environmental conditions wanted to confirm the location of breeding grounds. Using satellite images, which didn’t have sufficient resolution to see individual birds, they were able to identify colonies due to the staining of the ground by guano – the penguins stay at the colony for around eight months. The work confirmed the location of 26 colonies and found 10 more.

Then in December last year a team of Belgian and Swiss explorers visited one of these colonies, finding around 9,000 birds. The article at The Atlantic has the photos.

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Jared Diamond of The New York Times provides an interesting lesson about how people in the modern world perceive dangers. After witnessing friends in New Guinea refusing to sleep under an old, dead tree due to the risk of it falling he realised that people have begun to worry more about the bigger, more unlikely risks such as terrorist attacks, nuclear radiation, plane crashes and so on and be less vigilant towards smaller risks that are taken or encountered very often – risks that are ignored because people think “that’s not a problem, I’m careful” while often not being.

I personally have this “hypervigilant attitude towards repeated risks” or “constructive paranoia” – I watch what I’m doing when I’m descending the long flight of stairs outside, I wear well treaded shoes on snow and ice and I’m particularly careful when handling sheet glass; which can literally be lethal, or at least painful as the scars on my hands from unavoidable accidents attest.

As the article states, with access to emergency services and the assumption that help is only moments away the awareness of real dangers has become diminished and unlikely ones exaggerated.

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I often miss the garden I had where I previously lived, before I moved to the town centre surrounded by concrete, roads, car parks, oh and a river and fields at the back. Anyway, my garden was a wedge of land with a patio at one end and rows of flowers and plants. I’d go and buy new plants at the weekends, once I planted a substantial shrub and was livid to find that slugs had defoliated it entirely overnight.

If I still had my garden I could perhaps combine it with my geek side and buy a gadget from Parrot to be released later in the year. Known for their AR Drones this isn’t a slug-busting mini helicopter with slime-seeking missiles – brings a whole other meaning to the SALT treaty. The Flower Power device measures sunlight, humidity, temperature and nutrient levels and can be customised to most types of plant so you can individually, and remotely keep track of the conditions your flowers are living with from the comfort of your sofa.

Now, engineers of Parrot, bring me my anti-slug drone.

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I have watched the river behind where I live rise, flood and then recede over the last few weeks, the floods were at once potentially devastating yet fascinating. In the past these floodplains were left for the rivers to occupy when needed but now as town expand and risk areas usually only used for industry are redeveloped for housing more people are choosing to live with the risk.

The general opinion is that floods are an occasional occurence, in this country we don’t often have our brick-built buildings swept away by floodwaters and the locations, often with beautiful views are worth paying the price for. So research has found that even after major floods house prices in affected areas haven’t dramatically dropped, though it does discourage some people from moving into a town from elsewhere.

Some homeowners even come up with methods of flood-proofing their homes rather than give them up to the forces of nature. One problem that comes with the risk though is that insurance companies are more likely in future to refuse to insure flood risk houses, potentially making them difficult to sell.

In addition it is also thought that much of the flooding is caused by the developments themselves, with too much ground covered with concrete and tarmac and nowhere for rainwater to drain away, and what can be taken away draining into antiquated sewers. Flooding is likely to be a regular reality for many more people in the future and the best defence is preparation to protect your valuables.

Someone once said “the revolution will be televised”, in that case it will almost certainly also be heavily sponsored. In Britain as “London 2012” looms large on the horizon it’s jagged magenta shards casting a great shadow upon our capital. Ahem, sorry. As the games draw close our commercial TV channels are increasingly packed with adverts from the official sponsors/supporters/partners. British Airways encourages people to not use their services to fly abroad but to stay at home instead and support Team GB (by all means use BAs internal flights of course). The athletes will be able to have a pre-event snack on the official cereal bar of the olympic games though Nature Valley’s adverts are the most light hearted and least sentimentalized of the lot. According to their ads P&G have the competitors every need seen to from keeping their kit pristine with washing powder, their hair clean, right down to essential “feminine hygiene products” to keep Mother Nature at bay. If they eat at the Official Restaurant of the games, Maccy D’s, then they won’t need the Fairy washing up liquid much though. If consolation is needed then a losing javelin thrower can skewer a Dairy Milk from the official treat supplier of the games. They can pay on their olympic Visa cards.

Joking aside the games sponsorship has received criticism in many areas including the heavy levels of sponsorship from fast food and drink companies; the fact that spectators are not allowed to use any device that is capable of recording video (must watch the footage on Sky/BBC coverage of course); and the fact that their terms for the torch relay advised that runners should wear “comfortable, unbranded or Adidas shoes.” One commenter suggested simply running barefoot. Apparently one mum in Kent was told she couldn’t wear a Help for Heroes wristband.

Then there’s the food and we return to the Official Restaurant, mine’s a Big Mac, thanks. In McDonalds’ sponsorship deal it is specified that they can have the monopoly on selling chips or french fries unless sellers jump through the loophole of them being part of a Fish and Chips package and even then LOCOG had to ask McDonalds for permission to allow our traditional combo. In the same article The New Statesman reminds us that T-shirts with logos of companies that aren’t official sponsors have been banned from the Olympic Park. Some credit though goes to the LOCOG catering team who are trying to provide an interesting selection of food for visitors.

Companies and organisations not officially linked to the games have been referring to “the events this summer” for fear of getting into trouble for mentioning the word “Olympics” due to restrictions to control “unauthorised association” with the games – a concept which has even been enshrined in law especially for the games. If you do say anything about LOCOG that they consider is in a “derogatory and objectionable manner” then you can’t link to the Olympics site, Mike Masnick at Techdirt linked anyway here.

I’m far from alone in my view of the Olympics sponsorship, while preparing this entry The Independent also launched a debate on the subject as have the BBC whose piece includes the story of a butcher who was told to remove a 2012 themed display of sausages, an old lady who couldn’t sell a £1 knitted doll in a olympic kit, and the Birmingham Royal Ballet who were forced to change the name of a production from “Faster, Higher, Stronger – the Olympic motto – to Faster”.

I’m not a fan of the Olympics as such but as it’s in our country I do hope that the sports will take centre stage from next friday and it’ll be an event to remember for the right reasons.

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I ride a bike to work, and enjoy cycling, the wind in your hair, well the wind in just about every part of you depending on how you’re dressed. So it was interesting to watch this video showing how bikes were made in postwar Britain, shortly before the coronation.

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Even in the 21st Century some English traditions are still clinging on thanks to the dedication of individuals. One of them, the annual cheese rolling at Cooper’s Hill was run, rolled and somersaulted yesterday.

The tradition was officially ended in 2010 but has been continued by enthusiasts even though last year’s contest was controversially cancelled over plans to charge for taking part.

The four races down the 200m hill were run in conditions described as damp and the Jubilee Cheese was won by Craig Fairley of Brockworth.

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It seems you just can’t go anywhere to be by yourself these days. Not even Mount Everest.

Outside Magazine reports that at the start of the spring summit season last weekend there were 300 people on the mountain.

I know the feeling of going up a mountain in the Lake District and finding the summit crowded with people, that can be frustrating enough when you want to take photos of the view but to mount an expedition up the world’s highest mountain and have to queue for the summit – that’s frustration, even for us English who have made queuing an artform.